Making a 100% Whole Wheat pizza - almost there

[SeanFinn]

Well I have been working on making a 100 % whole wheat pizza, well as close as you can get without having to add additional ingredients to get a great final product. 

I am basically mixing:

Whole wheat
Ground flaxseed
gluten
salt
yeast
honey
warm water

I use to mix it all and then let it sit for about 30 mix to rise and it came out OK.

But then in my search to make a better pizza so I could sell at farmer markets I tried to step it up a notch.  I started trying a technique I read about on one of the pizza blogs on the internet where they mix all the ingredients but only 75% of the flour and then let it sit for awhile (15-20 minutes) and then finish mixing the rest of the flour until it has a nice mix.  Then you let it rise for about 20 minutes and put it in the frid for at least 12 hrs.  The dough taste great but it does not seem to be very easy to stretch, as soon as I make it the size I want, it starts to shrink back to about half the size.  I have to end up putting weights on the crust and then I'm able to add the sauce and cheese.  It does shrink a bit but I am trying to find out why it is shrinking to begin with.  Any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

[Davydd]

Soon, I will also be trying to make a 100% whole wheat pizza dough. I just bought the book, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and their recipes call for vital wheat gluten for their bread and pizza doughs for whole wheat. The five minutes a day concept is also a kneadless method which means of course you have to refrigerate ferment. I have Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten. The recipes for two pizzas call for 1/4 cup with about 6 cups of flour be it whole wheat or a combination with unbleached flour.

[SeanFinn]

Sounds great...I actually use almost all Bob Red Mill products, especially for my WW/Gluten and yeast.  I am in the process of starting my on sourdough starter so I'm excited to see if I can give that a try.
I look forward to your findings.

Thanks,

[Frankie G]

hey SeanFinn

I may sound dumb hear but, how about instead of stretching, just using a rolling pin? 

I do understand that whole-wheat is difficult, and most whole-wheat pizza one buys in a pizza shop, has a little but of whole-wheat flour in it.....  i do agree it's tough to stretch.

[Puzzolento]

Do you really need all that stuff? I made my first whole wheat pie by mixing whole wheat and white flour 50-50 (otherwise, same as my regular recipe), because that's what was recommended on a flour bag or something. Then I dumped the white flour and used 100% whole wheat, and it worked fine. I know I can toss a 50-50 crust because I did it last week. I can't recall whether that worked with 100% whole wheat, but the results I got with a rolling pin were excellent.

[SeanFinn]

You are right, when mixing in the white pastry flour with the WW I get a good pizza.  But I'm looking for a real 100% WW pizza.  In the pacific northwest, everything organic/green/whole grain is just a major seller and I'm hoping to create a worthy pie worth selling at the farmers market.  I love to cook and especially pizza.  I am working on a portable brick oven so I can use that to cook my pizza's.  Long journey but I think it will be worth it in the end.  Thanks.

[Crider]

Go with a higher hydration for your whole wheat and you will have a much better time stretching your pizza crust. There's a user VillaRoma who was using as much as 100% hydration with their WW dough.

I've been making a do-it-yourself graham flour and the results have been great. Graham flour is a mix of 83% white flour, 14.5% wheat bran, and 2.5% wheat germ. This formula duplicates the ratio of what's in a wheat berry itself.

Adding the wheat bran separately means the particles of bran are larger than what's in regular WW flour. The dough handles much better than standard WW flour and you get to use any type of white flour you wish (even Caputo 00). If you get fresh bran and germ, it will keep sweet a long time in the freezer, while WW flour gets bitter as it ages.

I lightly toast the bran and then soak it overnight before I make the dough and the flavor is very nice. The soaked bran is also very soft. Hydration is a bit lower with graham flour than with whole wheat. I use around 75% normally.

[charbo]

There are a number of ways to correct excess elasticity.  More hydration has been mentioned.  Some other ways include the use of poolish, longer or warmer fermentation, possibly more yeast, or weaker flour.  You can use winter wheat instead of spring wheat, or you can blend in some soft whole wheat.
Of course, drop the gluten.

[SeanFinn]

Thanks for all the  information.  I will  be testing tomorrow with some of the suggestions and report back.

Cheers

[scottfsmith]

I believe the two keys to great whole-wheat crusts are high hydration (as already mentioned), and long fermentation with little yeast at the start.  I use from 80-100% hydration and 24-hour room-temp fermentation times.  Skip the wheat gluten.  Make sure to read Villa Novas big thread -- http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,5682.0.html -- thats what got me started down a successful whole wheat road.  I found my family did not like thin-crust WW pizza (or WW bread) but they love a sicilian-style 100% WW and I make that frequently.  The longer cooking times needed for the thicker crust seems to take the edge off the whole grains and make it more pleasantly edible.

Scott

[SeanFinn]

Hey Scott,

Thanks for the link, that was a lot of reading!  It seems that they have tried a lot of different methods.  I'm trying to understand the whole Hydration concept, I'm using 155 gr of WW to 120 gr of water.  I'm also still putting in ground flax-seed,honey,salt,O.O.,little yeast and a little gluten.  It seems that it stays moist if I let it sit in the frig over night but it does not spread very well.  If I allow it to sit outside, it doubles in size but seems to be a bit tough or brittle in spots.  I'm still working on learning the small details to making a good crust, I appreciate the help from all and hopefully soon my trial and error method will produce a great WW crust.

[scottfsmith]

Sean, I don't do fridge fermentation for WW but I expect you need 2-3 days in the fridge to get far enough.  I'm not sure what you mean by tough and brittle in spots -- are you covering it when it is fermenting?   The way I do WW is 24-hour room temp and give it a couple folds in the bowl every 4-8 hours (basically whenever convenient, it doesn't have to be exact).  These folds are all the kneading I do, so it is more in the school of stretch-and-fold break making.  If I am making thin pies I use a very large amount of bench flour; for thick pies I just spread out bit by bit on the pan, so over the course of 5-10 minutes it has the whole pan covered.

Scott

[Crashcup]

Hi:

I've read through practically every thread on 100% whole wheat and have made numerous attempts to hydrate at 80-100%.  People have asked but have not seen the definitive answer to the question: "How do you get dough to form a ball or keep from sticking to absolutely everything at that high a hydration?"  When I attempt such high hydration my dough is a tacky mess.  As a result, I'm probably responsible for the sharp rise in worldwide wheat prices.

Bill

[barryvabeach]

Bill, I am with you.  I started with white bread flour for pizza and got that pretty good.  Then started to substitute 1/3 whole wheat for the  bread flour, then kept moving towards 100% whole wheat.  I ended up adding wheat gluten and getting a good pie with a 24 rise in the fridge.  Read the post on 100% hydration, and tried Villa's method at 85% -  what little dough that didn't stick to my hands or the board ended up tasting like cardboard.  I think I added so much flour for the final turnout, that it changed the taste.  Villa posted that he is working on a new recipe and I may try that out. With the whole wheat I wasted making pizza, and a bread fiasco recently, I think I am greatly contributing to the world wide demand. Barry.

[charbo]

Other than bench flour, stickiness can be mitigated by extra salt or oil in the dough and by prior experience with rye dough.